PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE SOUTHWEST VISION By Eric Shaw
Gallup is the center of its own art world, and New Mexico’s sense of enchantment inspires people to recognize beauty everywhere in the state. New Mexico helps artists make art—as the local production of jewelry, blankets, and figurines testifies to. The Southwest has influenced art worldwide, as well as locally. Famous painters like Georgia O’Keefe and great writers like D.H. Lawrence engaged the land. It’s captivated great photographers, too. I want to take you on a tiny tour of Southwest photographers—looking at three artists from past and present—one’s famous, one’s obscure, and one lives right in Gallup’s downtown. The philosophies and subject matter of these three will train us to see New Mexico in ways outside the norm.
Dorothea Lange, Raildroad Tracks, Southwestern New Mexico, 1933
Dorothea Lange, White Angel
The first is Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965).
As a renowned Depression-era photographer, she isn’t known for pictures of the Southwest, but she worked here when depicting the refugees of the 30s Dustbowl and the 40s internment camps. She took some landscape pictures, besides. She was spirited when young, attending Columbia University and breaking out to travel the world at age 23. However, she was robbed when she hit San Francisco and ended up settling down across the bay in Berkeley— for the rest of her life! There, she married one of the Southwest’s famous painters, Maynard Dixon, whose way of depicting landscapes, in simplified geometries of gorgeous hues, call to mind the work of O’Keefe—though he lacked O’Keefe’s lyrical sense of abstraction and great adventurousness in color. Fifteen years in, she left Dixon and wed the UC Berkeley professor, Paul Schuster Taylor. Together, they toured New Mexico and other areas where Dust Bowl refugees settled. The Farm Security Administration paid for this work. Later the War Relocation Authority employed her to photograph the forced displacement of Japanese Americans—whose internment camps were often located in Southwest deserts. Her pictures powerfully influenced national policy toward dislocated farmers, and when she got back to Berkeley, her influential work continued through the founding of Aperture Magazine with Southwest photographer, Ansel Adams. There was no magazine like it. It supplied a rare platform for serious examples of photographic craft and was the first magazine of its sort since O’Keefe’s husband, Alfred Steiglitz, published Camera Work from 1903 to 1917. Of her work in this area, one writer said, “Her images of the Southwest are unconcerned with its beauty, depicting it as less of a place and more of a blank space between places.” 40
March 2018
Lange herself was critical of photographers who took advantage of the “obviously picturesque” Southwest — suggesting that it was too easy to take pictures here. Dorothea Lange, untitled internment camp photograph, c. 1942 Her picture, Railroad Tracks Southwestern New Mexico, ignores the commonplace bravura vision inspired by the dramatic scale of the state’s flatlands, rocks, and sky. Plain, but geometrically interesting, her photo successfully shows a “place between places.” She fought polio her whole life and said of it, “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, [and] helped me.” Eventually, esophageal cancer killed her. She died in San Francisco in 1965—the city that first restrained her wandering ways. She was 70.
Unlike Lange, Berlyn Brixner (1911 – 2009) isn’t known for his artistic or social vision.
But the wartime government paid his bills, just as it did Lange’s. His fame came from making a visual record of the Manhattan Trinity Test in Alamogordo, New Mexico—the first detonation of an A-Bomb. Seventy-three years ago, Bixner’s southwest vision rocked the world. His contribution is historical in terms of technique, as well as subject matter. When called to his role, he had to invent photo methods to reveal something brighter than the sun that existed for scant seconds. He came up with rotating mirror cameras (which could take pictures at hundreds of thousands of frames per second), and on July 16, 1945, he created some of the most famous Southwest images known.
